[lionhearted]

Before I got started, I reviewed a bunch of popular blogs. There's basically two ways to build a successful blog - the first is to only produce extremely high quality content. This means writing less frequently and throwing away your pieces that aren't incredibly polished and don't come out just right.

This is the model that Paul Graham and Derek Sivers follow, for instance. This model requires you to let pretty-good-but-not-excellent blog posts/essays die on the vine, so the signal:noise ratio remains incredibly high.

The other way is to post every single day. I did a little surveying of the landscape, and it seems like going from 4x per week to every single day produces a few massive jumps - more consistent visitors, a faster finding and evolving of your core topics of any given time, and faster evolution in your writing ability.

If you've already got practice in writing, a well-defined theme, and have launched enough projects or writing or marketing materials that you can recognize when you've got a winner on your hands, then the high-quality-only model can work well. For the rest of us, every single day is far more likely to lead to improvement and successes.

[revorad]

How do you rate your own writing? What percentage of your posts make the extremely high quality content mark that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?

[lionhearted]

> How do you rate your own writing?

You can do it objectively or subjectively. Objectively you'd use some metrics or measurements. I do a little of that, but mostly it's a subjective "feel" thing.

> What percentage of your posts make the extremely high quality content mark that you attribute to PG and Sivers?

I thought about this for a while, and I'm not sure how to answer it... I don't really benchmark myself against Graham or Sivers.

Yeah, I'm not really sure how to answer this. In a good month, I'll write between 1 and 6 pieces where everything comes together at the height of my current ability... but I'm still developing my skill, so even a couple months later I'll see a number of improvements I could make to a pretty good post.

> If your aim is to improve as a writer, then over time shouldn't your output reduce to only keep the good stuff and filter out the not-so-good stuff?

Easier said than done! I'm not good at predicting what'll be popular yet. For instance, I wrote an analysis of why Walmart failed in Korea that I thought was particularly interesting, but it didn't take off. Then there's been some offhand casual posts I've made that do take off. Go figure, eh?